Last week we touched on the new Dalvik Turbo virtual machine from Myriad and now Engadget has captured a demo on video. The new Dalvik engine is supposed to offer performance improvements of two to three times depending on the application.

This could be great news for older Android phones, except you won’t be able to download or purchase the Dalvik Turbo engine. Instead, Myriad will work with carriers and manufacturers to implement the new software into their firmware.

Details are still scarce about what technology Myriad is using to achieve such results. I experienced a similar performance boost in benchmarks on my Nexus One using an experimental kernel that included JIT (just-in-tim compliation), which converts code at runtime prior to executing it natively. It was pretty unstable when I tested it, but Myiad and their team of engineers might have perfected it.

Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He resides in Dallas and carries the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One as his daily devices. Ask him a question on Twitter or Google+ and he is likely to respond. | Ethics statement

[...] a noticeable performance boost later this year. We have seen companies like Myriad pushing their Dalvik Turbo compiler which they claim offers “3x faster applications, richer game graphics and better [...]

Sounds pretty good, however I don’t like the idea that this is merged into the firmware on a per carrier/vendor base.
Whatever technology they use (as you do, I think it is a JIT) it sounds like a heavy modification to the underlying Runtime Environment.
I’m concerned about bugs in this implementation (or the official dalvik implementation) for which I cannot create workarounds based on the API level.
I have a s trong background in J2ME – tons of different virtual machines with tons of different bugs in the firmware. Believe me, we do not want this mess on Android.
If the code/implementation is good, it should be merged with the official sources, maybe replacing the existing JIT, which is AFAIK still in experimental state.

In response to Weeds, if Myriad is licensing their engine to hardware manufacturers and carriers individually, then it’s obviously proprietary. They’re not going to merge it with official sources, because then they couldn’t charge for it.

I’m with Weeds on this. It will create proprietary extensions of the core VM that won’t be available to everyone. You’ll have to have their software, meaning you’ll have to buy a special phone. It also will diminish the cross phone reach of the Android Market.

I also wonder, were they TRULY able to develop a fully functional Dalvik VM without including some bits from the original codebase? If not, what kinds of headaches will that cause a vendor who signs on to this? (Most open source licenses don’t allow you to modify the code and make people pay for it.)